This is a little experiment I conducted to see if the tales about the textures on Skyrim are any different if you have the game installed to the HDD or not.

One of the Skyrim devs said on twitter that there was no difference so I made this video.

I did this on a retail copy with the day 1 patch installed after clearing my system cache.

You can clearly see more texture on my character's hand when the game isn't installed to the HDD.

This is the second time I conducted the experiment. The first time I conducted it I found that when the game was installed to the HDD both the leather armour texture AND my character's hand were really low res yet looked much better without the game installed. The second time, as seen in this video, it was just the hand that looked better without the install.

Update: I did this a few more times outdoors and indoors and I consistently experienced lower res textures when playing off the HDD.